


in we drift like fish bones on the tide

by patho (ghostsoldier)



Category: Kraken - China Mieville
Genre: Gen, M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-21
Updated: 2013-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-05 10:34:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1092864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostsoldier/pseuds/patho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because rogue crusaders and feral prophets need a break too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in we drift like fish bones on the tide

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Trojie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trojie/gifts).



They’re running out of places to go to ground. Dane’s list of safe hideaways is extensive but not infinite, and it’s with a sinking stomach that he mentally scrolls through all the available places they might rest safely and realizes there aren’t any. None that he’d feel comfortable with using, anyway. Not after the Chaos Nazis. Not with Goss and fucking Subby still lurking about. The places he has in mind now are little more than boltholes, abandoned and out of the way, and instead of illusionary inhabitants Dane’s knackery now strives to imply a sense of vague and hollow emptiness. 

Billy doesn’t complain about the change. He complains about very little, actually, now that things have really gone to shit. Dane’s impressed in spite of himself. Billy’s taken to being a fugitive prophet far better than Dane thought he would. The fragile little scientist of before, with his styled hair and soft palms and confused wet eyes, is nothing like the man who half-led, half-carried Dane out of that warehouse. He keeps insisting he’s not a prophet, but he is. He has to be. Who but a prophet could’ve convinced the sea to break its neutrality? 

They hole up in condemned block that first night after leaving the Londonmancers. Dane leans against the crumbling concrete outside, ostensibly keeping watch as Billy sets himself to the messy, splinter-filled business of prying boards free from half-shattered windows just enough to let them inside. He doesn’t need to help Dane clamber through the opening but does anyway, as though he’s reassuring himself of Dane’s solidity. His there-ness, his continued existence. 

Dane thinks about the way Billy said his name when he found him on the rack. The way he’d touched the kraken earlier that night, careful but unflinching, his fingers gently prodding holy flesh as if asking for its secrets, and it occurs to Dane that this is twice now Billy’s hands have been on his dead god and something low in his stomach _burns_.

“Listen,” Billy’s saying. “There’s a Tesco up the road a ways. I can stop in, grab us some sandwiches or something--”

Dane casts a glance sideways. “Don’t tell me you’re actually hungry.”

“I’m not! I just, I don’t know.” Billy somehow manages to convey a sense of flailing without moving all that much. The aborted stutter of his arms and shoulders, the way his face creases. “I thought maybe you could use a bite to eat.”

Dane sighs and scrubs at his cheeks and forehead. Now that he’s not in the kraken’s presence he feels small and tired and old and _useless_. “Not hungry,” he mutters. “What I am is worried about Jason, and wondering where the fuck Wati got off to, and wondering why we ain’t doing much of anything at the moment.”

“A few hours of sleep while we wait for Wati to come back won’t kill us,” Billy says, quiet but unwavering. Once, he might’ve backed down. Dane’s a big man and he knows how to use this to his advantage, how to repurpose and channel his anger into action. Intimidation. Once, Billy was afraid of him, or at least of what he represented.

But Billy’s touched gods and talked to the sea; Billy is beloved of an angel. Billy Harrow, pale beneath his freckles in the gloomy murk of the condemned block, meets Dane’s eyes without flinching and says, “We’ll go after Jason soon as we hear from Wati, all right? You need--”

_Now_ he looks uncomfortable. _Now_ he flinches away, just a bit, from what he wants to say. Dane narrows his eyes. “I need _what_?”

“Sleep,” Billy says finally. Runs a hand through his messy hair, making it stick up, just for a moment, in a way bizarrely reminiscent of the style he used to affect back at the Darwin Centre. “After what happened today, after what happened to you--” 

Dane looks away, but Billy presses on. “You really need to get a few hours of sleep. You’ll be useless to Jason otherwise.”

This man is not the same man who once injected formalin and saline into the cold, thawing body of a dead baby god without any idea of what he’d done. He’s not the man who followed Dane down meandering alleys and roads, always slightly behind him, as if seeking to protect himself in the lee of Dane’s bulk. No more bewildered, wide-eyed naivete, not anymore. This man is the one who talked down the ocean. 

Compared to that, Dane supposes, taking on a muscular ex-soldier probably isn’t as big a deal as it once was.

“I don’t want to fight you,” Billy says, sudden and absurd. “But so help me God, I’ll do it unless you sit the fuck _down_ for a minute.”

Dane starts to laugh. Can’t help but laugh. The sound is hoarse and a little broken, like his vocal cords remember all the terrible things the Chaos Nazis did to them and don’t quite believe they’re intact, but the sentiment behind it is genuine.

“I bet you don’t want to fight me,” Dane says. “Seeing as I’m the one showed you all your moves and everything.”

A grin, small and sweet, slowly meanders over Billy’s face. “Don’t know if you noticed this or not,” he says, “but you also happen to be a rather large man.”

“You calling me fat?”

“I’m saying you could snap my spine like a toothpick.”

Dane gives in. It’s clear Billy’s not going to budge on the issue, not until Wati gets back, and although he’s had plenty of practice at ignoring his body’s demands for things like rest and sleep and nourishment, there’s no denying the exhaustion drumming up his spine and into the backs of his eyes. The room swims for a moment, wavering like an undersea vista, before it clicks back into focus again.

Billy sits, carefully. Grins up at Dane through clean glasses in an otherwise grimy face. “Come on,” he says. “I’ll even tell you a bedtime story.”

Dane eases himself to the damp wooden floor. The expected stab of pain doesn’t come, merely a long low throb, and against his better judgment Dane’s muscles start to relax, one by one, as he settles back against the wall alongside Billy.

“Nah,” he says. “You don’t know the good ones.”

“And you do?”

“My granddad did,” Dane says. “And I got ‘em from him, so...yeah, I guess I do.”

Billy laughs softly. “Do I even want to know what kinds of bedtime stories Teuthists tell their kids? ‘Once upon a time, in the vast and crushing darkness...’”

Surprisingly accurate, actually, and Dane’s about to tell him so, when he tilts his head back to rest against the mildewing wallpaper and his eyes slide closed of their own accord and 

_tentacled God in darkness please give me your strength to listen and to learn oh krakens in your vast silent wisdom have mercy have mercy have mercy **please**_

Dane’s eyes snap open. His breathing is much too loud and much too fast.

“Dane?” A warm hand touches the bunched muscles of his forearm, hesitant at first, then more confidently. Careful and unflinching, the way he’d touched the kraken. Dane hisses from between clenched teeth, not trusting himself to speak; if he opened his mouth, if he tried to force words from his frozen throat--

He’s not sure what sounds he might make.

“You don’t have to talk about it,” Billy says quietly. “Not to me. Not if you don’t want to.” The hand on Dane’s arm moves with gentle deliberation, up broad tense muscle, down to his bruised knuckles, and Dane doesn’t realize he’d been shaking until the shaking abruptly stops.

Dane clears his throat. Fixes his gaze across the big, empty room so he doesn’t have to look at Billy. Billy Harrow, preserver of gods, who has yet to stop touching Dane’s arm.

“I was afraid I’d give you up,” Dane finally croaks. “Not the kraken, never the kraken, I’m a kraken man and so was my granddad and I never could’ve--” He shakes his head. The absentminded sweep of Billy’s thumb over his wrist sears like a trail of fire. “You, though. I was afraid that I’d...if they hurt me enough. For long enough. Because they’re weren’t going to let me die until I gave them what they wanted, and after a while--

“Shit, Billy. I would’ve. If they’d kept going, if they brought me back three, four, _ten_ times? I would’ve done it, if it meant they’d let me die.”

The hand on Dane’s arm stills. For a long moment, their breathing is the only sound in the room: Dane’s ragged with shame and anger, Billy’s slow and steady.

“You didn’t, though,” Billy says. There’s no censure in his voice, only calm. “If we hadn’t gotten you out in time, yeah, maybe you would’ve, but that’s not what happened. You’ve got my forgiveness if you want it, Dane, but you sure as hell don’t need it.”

“It was all darkness,” Dane says. “What they pulled me out of both times. It wasn’t the good dark, not the deep crushing black where the gods live. It was a different sort.”

Billy is silent next to him, an odd grounding presence. Dane can feel the weight of his gaze, and finds he doesn’t mind.

“And that’s what I see,” he says. “Every time I close my eyes. I see the dark, the bad dark, the kind where nothing swims or eats or lives or dies. The dark where I would’ve gone, after.”

“I thought you got to live in the skin of your saints after you died,” Billy says. Dane blinks, looks at him. “You know. In a chromatophore. Bioluminescence and all. Like that one knack of yours, the one where you--” 

He snaps his fingers a few times, smiles. Dane’s own smile is wan, feels alien after what they’ve been talking about, but at least it’s there.

“‘S’only if you’ve been very very good,” he says. “Which you and I both know I haven’t been.”

“What could be more good than rescuing your god and preventing the wrong apocalypse?” Billy squeezes Dane’s arm and pulls his hand away to dig in his pocket. Dane’s forearm feels colder in its absence.

“Besides,” Billy’s saying, “since when do cephalopods give a shit about things like ‘good’ or ‘bad’? You told me yourself, that’s a human way of looking at it. Kraken don’t care. Kraken just _are_. Ah, got it.”

Even as he registers the little bottle as the one given to Billy by the Teuthex, Dane’s already shaking his head. It’s not _for_ him, that little bottle, and neither are its inky contents. It’s for prophets, people like Billy. For Billy’s dreams, not that those have been much help to them of late. “No,” he says. “No way.”

“After all the shit you went through today, it’ll probably help you sleep,” Billy says. “At the very least, maybe it’ll change the kind of dark you see when you close your eyes.”

“I can’t,” Dane says, all but despairing. His entire body is one massive throb of weary exhaustion. He misses the cool of the kraken’s tank against his cheek.

“Look, Dane...” Billy frowns, then looks as though he’s come to some decision. “Okay,” he says, “okay,” and he draws up half a dropper of ink and places it carefully on his tongue, and then he’s leaning in, bracing one hand on Dane’s shoulder, the other resting on the side of Dane’s neck.

“What--” Dane says, and Billy kisses him.

It’s a good kiss in spite of the circumstances, or maybe because of them. Billy, who’s touched Dane’s god twice and now touches Dane like he’s something important, something worth preserving the way he preserves his specimens. Billy’s warm mouth, the taste of the ocean on his lips and salt-pungent on his tongue. Dane could’ve said no, had plenty of time to say no, but it’s a gift freely offered and Dane finds he doesn’t want to refuse it. He keeps his eyes open. Billy’s eyes, he notices with an aching pang, are closed.

He presses the flat of his palm to Billy’s chest. His heartbeat is a reassuring thud, predictable and comforting as the tides, and at the touch Billy opens his eyes. Draws back. One side of his mouth tilts up, and in the gloom his eyes are the color of the ocean at dusk.

“Close your eyes,” Billy says. He puts his arm around Dane and tugs him in. He’s a bony but surprisingly comfortably pillow. “Get some sleep. I’ll wake you when Wati gets here.”

_Thank you_ , Dane wants to say, but the day has finally caught up with him and he’s sliding into a doze before he can get the words out. The steady rise and fall of Billy’s breathing, the rich inky burst of salt that remains on his tongue. Dane drifts, a guttering little spark of consciousness through deep murky currents. A single mote, alone in the vast, unending dark.

And then, out in the darkness, faint and flickering and _there_ , Dane sees a light.


End file.
